Dawn Upshaw & Emanuel Ax in de Grote Zaal

Net terug uit Berlijn en woensdag 10 maart al weer naar het Concertgebouw voor "Vocaal in de Grote Zaal". Het Concertgebouw blurbt: "Emanuel Ax is niet alleen een groot pianist, hij heeft ook de bescheidenheid om andere grote musici te laten schitteren. Vandaar dat hij ook in de rol van begeleider kruipt en de onvolprezen Dawn Upshaw het publiek wederom laat veroveren."
Het programma:
Chopin, Prutsman (premiere), Schumann. (Who the f... is Prutsman???) Prutsman dus, omdat haar persoonlijke componist Golijov het af liet weten.
Tja... Dawn Upshaw houdt van "bijzondere" muziek; speciale liederen programma's, wereldpremieres, weinig gespeeld eigentijds repertoire:
"It says much about Dawn Upshaw’s sensibilities as an artist and colleague that she is a favored partner of many leading musicians, including Richard Goode, the Kronos Quartet, James Levine, and Esa-Pekka Salonen. In her work as a recitalist, and particularly in her work with composers, Dawn Upshaw has become a generative force in concert music, having premiered more than 25 works in the past decade. From Carnegie Hall to large and small venues throughout the world she regularly presents specially designed programs composed of lieder, unusual contemporary works in many languages, and folk and popular music."
Ondanks het feit dat ze nooit een conventioneel programma zong heb ik toch altijd een zwak voor haar gehad: van die waanzinnige rozen-aria uit le nozze di Figaro (Levine)tot "Angel" van Joe Jackson, van de 3e symfonie van Gorecki (Live Aid)-de 1e klassieke cd die een "Hit" werd- tot haar Sophie in Werther bij De Nederlandse Opera, van haar "White Moon" cd tot Pierot Lunaire in het Concertgebouw in '98, ze blijft een bijzondere zangeres.
You tube doet haar geen recht, maar ja ... iets is beter dan niets.





"Dawn Upshaw / Emanuel Ax, Barbican Hall, London

Reviewed by Edward Seckerson

Saturday, 13 March 2010

It is something of a paradox than Chopin could make the piano sing like few others in musical history but on the evidence his meagre collection of songs could not unlock that effortless facility in the human voice.

Pianistic bel canto, yes; vocal, no. Listening to the first half of this oddly schizophrenic recital from Dawn Upshaw and Emanuel Ax the puzzlement grew with each successive song: seven of them, to be precise, each from the collection labelled “Polish” (wasn’t everything?) and none especially grateful for the soprano voice.

Upshaw and Ax are taking this recital on the road to celebrate the 200th anniversaries of Chopin and Schumann but I can only guess that preparation time was foreshortened in some way because the normally super-communicative Upshaw was buried in her copy sounding decidedly uneasy about both the language and the vocal inflections. Even Polish-born Ax, for whom this music is a birth-right, was somewhat tentative and untidy.

But what was going on with Upshaw? One of my favourite artists seemed to be in some vocal distress with phrases poorly sustained, intervals uncertain, and much chesting of the lower register. To be frank, they sounded like sight-readings, although the last two songs – “Faded and Gone”, possessed of a folksy ache, and “My Darling”, a song at last displaying Chopin’s pianistic rapture – seemed to bring the voice and personality into focus. Right now they sound closer to speech than song – or maybe that’s how Upshaw and Ax feel them. At any rate, they need to be more thoroughly digested.

And I would suggest that Stephen Prutsman’s setting of Billy Collins poems Piano Lessons (replacing a previously announced Golijov piece) makes for an odd interpolation into the evening. Funny on the page but hopelessly over-cooked in their musical context the problem here was the separation and dislocation of words killing most of the jokes before their pay-off.

The pay-off of this recital was Upshaw’s Schumann. Suddenly a very different singer was on the platform – involved, engaged, the feeling at last dictating the sound. The child in Upshaw is always full of wonder and when she tells a story you hang on every word. “Mignon’s Song” was particularly fine, not one phrase or emotion ringing false, and with “Dedication” her big hearted delivery filled the hall and stilled it, the central line of poetry “You are repose, you are peace” finding and holding an inwardness that had been conspicuously lacking earlier. "
Upshaw/Ax |Classical review

Tim AshleyMar 15, 2010

Barbican, London

The last of Emanuel Ax's Chopin and Schumann anniversary concerts was a song recital with soprano Dawn Upshaw that involved a notable change of programme. Ax's aim has been to present commemorative commissions alongside both composers' work, and in this instance we were scheduled to hear something new from Osvaldo Golijov. Golijov, however, failed to deliver, "and we didn't know about it until late", as Upshaw coolly put it. She and Ax were bailed out by her friend Stephen Prutsman, best known as an arranger for the Kronos Quartet, who, at speed, produced Piano Lessons, a song cycle to texts by Billy Collins, of whose poetry Upshaw is fond.

Piano Lessons is flawed, though it suits Upshaw and Ax uncommonly well. Prutsman has taken into account the changes time has made in Upshaw's voice – the occasional loss of brightness at the top, the greater expressiveness lower down – as well as her astonishing way with American poetry. As the piano pupil battling the irritations of practice, she's deliciously funny. The ending is exquisite: the resolution of Upshaw's struggle with "this curious beast", as she calls the piano, leaves Ax free to play a ravishing postlude that recalls Chopin and Schumann but never quotes either.

Chopin's songs, meanwhile, can seem foursquare, though Upshaw made a fine case for them, achieving great things with the world-weary melancholy of Faded and Gone and the self-pity of Out of My Sight. The unfussy directness of her and Ax's approach to Schumann, meanwhile, spoke volumes in songs such as Kennst du Das Land and In der Fremde, which are often overdramatised. This year also marks the 15oth anniversary of Hugo Wolf's birth: the encore was his Er Ist's, gloriously done.